Monday, April 3, 2023

Today’s Scripture Reading
Philippians 3:1–14

Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord.

To write the same things to you is not troublesome to me, and for you it is a safeguard.

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh—even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (NRSV)

Reflection

Being a Christian means striving for different things than the things we might strive for if we weren’t Christians. Not wealth and power, of course, but also not goodness itself.

Mark Edmundson writes in his book Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals about what he calls the “saintly” ideal. “The saint lives — or tries to live — beyond desire,” he writes. Tell that to St. Paul, the author of the letter to the Philippians we read from today. Paul is the champion of a gospel that is fueled by desire to strive for a prize not many can see. His way of describing that desire is to contrast it to what he used to desire, before Jesus came into his life, and you may be disappointed to learn that those things were not the desires of the flesh as much as the control of it.

What Paul used to desire was the physical embodiment of righteousness through as strict an adherence to religious precepts as he could attain. And he amassed an impressive resume. Only, in the light of the good news about Jesus’ death and resurrection, his former desire appears to him as “loss,” a life of religiously sunk costs. This conversion is not, however, a conversion away from desire, as if striving is itself the problem. Instead, it’s a conversion from one desire to another, from the desire to achieve a level of goodness we can be proud of to a desire for faith, the very faith of Jesus, that imparts Jesus’ goodness to us.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,” Edmundson writes. That’s a lot to want. But it’s just one thing, and I’m persuaded by the aphorism of the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

What are we striving for? In our worship and our prayers, our service and our study, the apostle would have us strive for faith first among all of it. By “faith” the Bible means trust, a personal trust in God that supersedes our trust in ourselves and our own resources of morality and intelligence, resources that are no doubt considerable. But compared to the riches of a faith like Jesus, they’re nothing.

Prayer

Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Written by Rocky Supinger, Associate Pastor for Youth and Worship

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